Subscribers

The data model for Brand Mobiliser mobile-subscribers storage is called subscribers. A group of subscribers and their attributes is called a set. The Subscribers screen lists all subscriber sets in the workspace.

Subscribers storage is available to all Brand Mobiliser applications. You can use subscribers storage as the system of record for small-scale implementations. Ideally, use subscribers storage as temporary storage, for staging, or as in-transit storage, pending batch transfer to a system of record. The database schema used by subscribers storage is not fully optimized for large-scale or more domain-specific purposes, such as for customer relationship management (CRM), or enterprise resource planning (ERP).

A subscribers set name is not required to be unique, but to avoid confusion, SAP recommends that it is. A set is made up of a list of rows with 21 fields. The KEY field is the unique key, and the remaining 20 fields are free form. The first free-form field, ATTRIB1, can store up to 1000 characters; the remaining free-form fields can store up to 320 characters each.

The set model is designed to store lists of subscribers. In a subscriber list, the KEY field stores a mobile subscriber’s unique MSISDN. You can use the remaining free-form fields to store additional attributes related to the subscriber. You can use these attributes in different ways; for example, to dynamically “mail-merge” into the SMS message template, to send customized SMS messages based on attributes, or to filter the number of SMS messages sent, based on specific attributes. Since SMS messages are limited to about 160 characters (varies based on the character-encoding type), Brand Mobiliser automatically breaks a long message into smaller pieces, and sends each piece as a separate SMS message.

You can use the Brand Mobiliser Web UI to generate a subscriber-set report, by exporting the set to a comma-separated value (CSV) file. You can also use a CSV file to transfer a set to a permanent system of record. CSV files can be read by spreadsheet programs, uploaded to databases, imported into reporting applications, and processed by custom-built applications.

If you need an automated process to transfer a set, you can create a Brand Mobiliser application using custom plug-in states, to send or upload the set in batch mode to the target system. To schedule a batch process, use the Brand Mobiliser event system. You can populate a set by uploading a CSV file on the Upload Subscriber screen, or you can create an empty set on the New Subscriber Set screen, and populate it automatically using Brand Mobiliser applications. For example, you can develop Brand Mobiliser applications to pull subscribers from:

A CRM system
Twitter followers
Facebook friends
LinkedIn connections

You can also add mobile subscribers who respond to a short code to opt in. You can use subscriber lists to collect customer data for real-time analytics and reporting.

Create and populate subscriber sets by:

Creating an empty set – then populate using either the Upload Merge or the Add Subscriber application state.
Uploading a subscriber file – either a CSV file or a compressed CSV file.